Downey Regional Medical Center (DRMC) is one of the top ten rated hospitals in Los Angeles County. Formerly Downey Community Hospital, DRMC has cared for the residents of greater South­east Los Angeles County for nearly 80 years.

DRMC, a 199-bed hospital which employs approximately 1100 administrative and nursing personnel, in addition to 700 physicians and specialists, prides themselves on providing the latest technology and skills to fulfill the health needs of each person they serve.

Business Challenge

Hospitals are required to comply with a variety of new laws every year, in addition to the standards that are already in place. The method this information is disseminated to hospitals and hospital staff are through voluminous documents called policies and procedures.

Almost every company maintains policies and procedures for Human Resource issues and other legal items, but hospitals are particularly inundated with this type of literature. When you or a loved one is in need of hospital care, you are thankful for a well organized and educated hospital staff. Hospital policies and procedures are a big part of how your care is given.

DRMC’s IT department was looking for a cost-effective, electronic publishing solution for policy and procedures documents. These documents were mostly available in hard copy, and the few electronic versions were hard to find. Therefore, the documents needed to be readily available and accessible to every employee.

Most healthcare professionals are already overloaded with professional training related to their careers, so the new system had to be easy enough to use without lengthy training sessions.

The ideal solution needed to avoid a resource intensive roll-out to their 1100+ user PCs and the ordeal of evaluating hardware needs for a new desktop software package.

ActivePDF Solution

John Kuhn, Senior Programmer at DRMC, was tasked with finding the ideal solution to manage and distribute policies and procedures to each and every employee. Kuhn looked at another solution that was more expensive and resource intensive, but it did not provide the automation features that he required.

“ActivePDF is a more complete and sophisticated solution than anything else I evaluated,” Kuhn says.

The solution implemented at DRMC consists of a Windows NT® server running IIS, ASP, MSSQL server and ActivePDF Portfolio. Kuhn found that ActivePDF was simple to implement because of the knowledgeable support and the many lines of sample code included with the software documentation.

“I was able to modify the sample code to suit our needs, which reduced the amount of learning time for me,” Kuhn proclaims.

“I haven’t begun to use all of the features that are included with ActivePDF Portfolio Suite,” says Kuhn.

Future plans include a web-based reporting feature, using ActivePDF products.

User Acceptance

The system is widely used and accepted at every level of the organization. Training is not a problem, because users are able to complete tasks through the web-browser, using familiar search and download functions.

Users just launch their web browser, log into the intranet site and they have immediate access to any document they need. They also have the ability to search for documents using document properties and keywords because the documents are all cataloged and indexed. Publishing documents is just as simple, and users can enter their own document data for cataloging.

“ActivePDF gives us the opportunity to provide a cost effective solution for publishing, using a document format that is compatible on every machine in the company,” says Kuhn.